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A daunting new augmented reality was neurally kindled, overlying the older individual one. It is important to realize that this reality is constructed by and runs on our coalitional programs and has no independent existence. You are a member of a coalition only if someone (such as you) interprets you as being one, and you are not if no one does. We project coalitions onto everything, even where they have no place, such as in science. We are identity-crazed....

JOHN TOOBY is the founder of the field of Evolutionary Psychology, co-director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, and professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. John Tooby's Edge Bio Page

Introduction

One of the joys of Edge, the incredible wealth of important ideas from leading thinkers, also presents a unique challenge. The 2017 Edge Question (What Scientific Term or Concept Ought to Be More Widely Known?), published this past January, consists of essays by 206 contributors comprising a manuscript of 143,000 words. It would be completely understandable for readers to have missed or skimmed over John Tooby’s seminal essay, “Coalitional Instincts.” What Tooby, the father of Evolutionary Psychology, has to say about coalitions, identity, tribalism, could just as well be on the front pages of today's leading newspapers. We are pleased to present "Coalition Instincts" with the hopes that it sparks a wide science-based conversation.

Having turned my back on propositions, I thought, what am I going to do about this? The area where it really comes up is when you start looking at the contents of consciousness, which is my number one topic. I like to quote Maynard Keynes on this. He was once asked, “Do you think in words or pictures?” to which he responded, “I think in thoughts.” It was a wonderful answer, but also wonderfully uninformative. What the hell’s a thought then? How does it carry information? Is it like a picture? Is it iconic in some way? Does it resemble what it’s about, or is it like a word that refers to what it’s about without resembling it? Are there third, fourth, fifth alternatives? Looking at information in the brain and then trying to trace it back to information in the genes that must be responsible for providing the design of the brain that can then carry information in other senses, you gradually begin to realize that this does tie in with Shannon's information theory. There’s a way of seeing information as "a difference that makes a difference," to quote Donald MacKay and Bateson.

Ever since then, I’ve been trying to articulate, with the help of Harvard evolutionary biologist David Haig, just what meaning is, what content is, and ultimately, in terms of biological information and physical information, the information presented in A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Shannon and Weaver. There’s a chapter in my latest book called “What is Information?” I stand by it, but it’s under revision. I’m already moving beyond it and realizing there’s a better way of tackling some of these issues.

DANIEL C. DENNETT is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author, most recently, of From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.Daniel C. Dennett's Edge Bio page

Edge originated in 1980 as The Reality Club. Beginning in September 1990, Edge #1, the first of five printed editions, was privately published to a limited audience. This continued through Edge #5, which was published in April 1992. At that point we switched to an email format and, eventually, in 1997, to the web-based Edge of today.

I ran into Danny Hillis recently, who asked, "Do you remember the postcards I sent out to the Reality Club list in 1991 asking 'Where (or What) Is Today's Frontier?' You published the answers in Edge #3. Wouldn't it be interesting to ask the same question 27 years later?"

On further discussion, we both quickly realized that the postcard format would be a problem because (a) many people have forgotten how to write, and (b) does anybody today know how or where to buy a stamp?

So, here again, in its entirety, is a downloadable PDF of the 16-pageEdge #3, with all kinds of interesting material...

• Alan Guth, the father of inflationary theory, on "What's new in the universe"

And, of course, the Edgies' responses to Danny Hillis's question, including his own prescient and optimistic response:

"I finally realized that the frontier had been sitting in my office all along—on the other side of the computer screen. That's basically where the cowboys are today. First, fortunes are being made and lost; second, it's where new law is being made, and third, new territories are up for grabs for anyone with the courage and imagination to take them. I didn't think this way when the project started."

The idea of a credit assignment function, reinforcing “neurons” that work, is the core of current AI. And if you make those little neurons that get reinforced smarter, the AI gets smarter. So, what would happen if the neurons were people? People have lots of capabilities; they know lots of things about the world; they can perceive things in a human way. What would happen if you had a network of people where you could reinforce the ones that were helping and maybe discourage the ones that weren't?

That begins to sound like a society or a company. We all live in a human social network. We're reinforced for things that seem to help everybody and discouraged from things that are not appreciated. Culture is something that comes from a sort of human AI, the function of reinforcing the good and penalizing the bad, but applied to humans and human problems. Once you realize that you can take this general framework of AI and create a human AI, the question becomes, what's the right way to do that? Is it a safe idea? Is it completely crazy?

ALEX "SANDY" PENTLAND is a professor at MIT, and director of the MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs. He is a founding member of advisory boards for Google, AT&T, Nissan, and the UN Secretary General. He is the author of Social Physics, and Honest Signal. Sandy Pentland's Edge Bio page

Artificial intelligence changes science and technology. Clear. But what does it do with society? Engineers, artists and scientists come to an inescapable realization.

By Andrian Kreye, October 13, 2017

[Editor’s Note: Edge was in London once again to continue its ongoing collaboration with The Serpentine Gallery and its “supercurator” Hans Ulrich Obrist. Longtime Edge contributor Andrian Kreye flew in from Munich for the event, and, wearing his hat as Feuilleton editor of the influential German national newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, wrote the front page lede story in the weekend edition. We are pleased to run the following translated excerpt. —JB]

It is not at all mistaken to look for insight into artificial intelligence by reading the folk tales in 1001 Nights. The writer Adam Thirlwell and the literary scholar Marina Warner, currently the President of the Royal Society of Literature, did just that last week in the great hall of the London City Hall. In the mighty spiral dome overlooking the Thames and Tower Bridge, a few dozen scientists, engineers, artists and writers met to look for coherent images for the artificial intelligence.

Sitting in the architecturally high-quality glistening autumn light, they publicly thought about whether the Oriental fairy-tale genie Djinn, this serviceable wish filler of smokeless fire, was not the perfect symbol for those digital forces, which are currently being unleashed everywhere. Not only could you see the digital flare as a contemporary image for the smoke-free fire, but it also poses the question of the controllability of this rebellious spirit of the bottle. Whoever frees him from his divine imprisonment has no idea of what Djinn's magical powers could do.

What is fascinating to me is that we are now hoping, with modern measurements, to probe the early Universe. In doing so, we’re encountering deep questions about the scientific method and questions about what is fundamental to physics. When we look out on the Universe, we’re looking through this dirty window, literally a dusty window. We look out through dust in our galaxy. And what is that dust? I like to call it nanoplanets, tiny grains of iron and carbon and silicon—all these things that are the matter of our solar system. They’re the very matter that Galileo was looking through when he first glimpsed the Pleiades and the stars beyond the solar system for the first time.

When we look out our telescopes, we never see just what we're looking for. We have to contend with everything in the foreground. And thank goodness for that dust in the foreground, for without it, we would not be here.

Professor BRIAN KEATING is an astrophysicist with the University of California San Diego’s Department of Physics. He and his team develop instrumentation to study the early universe at radio, microwave, and infrared wavelengths. He is the author of over 100 scientific publications and holds two U.S. patents. Brian Keating's Edge Bio page

What we're saying is that there is a technology emerging from behavioral economics. It's not only an abstract thing. You can do things with it. We are just at the beginning. I thought that the input of psychology into behavioral economics was done. But hearing Sendhil was very encouraging because there was a lot of new psychology there. That conversation is continuing and it looks to me as if that conversation is going to go forward. It's pretty intuitive, based on research, good theory, and important. — Daniel Kahneman

A decade ago, Edge convened its first "Master Class" in Napa, California, in which psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman taught a nine-hour course: "A Short Course On Thinking About Thinking." The attendees were a "who's who" of the new global business culture.

The following year, in 2008, we invited Richard Thaler, the father of behavioral economics, to continue the conversation by organizing and leading the class: "A Short Course On Behavioral Economics."

Thaler arrived at Stanford in the 1970s to work with Kahneman and his late partner, Amos Tversky. Thaler, in turn, asked Harvard economist and former student Sendhil Mullainathan, as well as Kahneman, to teach the class with him.

The entire text to the 2008 Master Class is available online, along with video highlights of the talks and a photo gallery. The text also appears in a book privately published by Edge Foundation, Inc.

Wallace Stevens had an immense insight into the way that we write the world. We don't just read it, we don't just see it, we don't just take it in. In "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," he talks about the dialogue between what he calls the Naked Alpha and the Hierophant Omega, the beginning, the raw stuff of reality, and what we make of it. He also said “reality is an activity of the most august imagination.”

Our job is to imagine a better future, because if we can imagine it, we can create it. But it starts with that imagination. The future that we can imagine shouldn't be a dystopian vision of robots that are wiping us out, of climate change that is going to destroy our society. It should be a vision of how we will rise to the challenges that we face in the next century, that we will build an enduring civilization, and that we will build a world that is better for our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It should be a vision that we will become one of those long-lasting species rather than a flash in the pan that wipes itself out because of its lack of foresight.

We are at a critical moment in human history. In the small, we are at a critical moment in our economy, where we have to make it work better for everyone, not just for a select few. But in the large, we have to make it better in the way that we deal with long-term challenges and long-term problems.

TIM O'REILLY is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., and the author of WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us. Tim O'Reilly's Edge Bio page

Gianluigi Ricuperati says his about the OGR in Turin, recently inaugurated with the imposing "Big Bang." Despite the goodness of the initiative, courageous on a number of fronts, effort is not enough. And the things to see are many.

The OGR dream was a succession of real emotional and intellectual Big Bangs. . . .

The OGR dream did not have a single director, but a "general invention committee" with Brian Eno, John Brockman, Alice Rawsthorn, Alex Poots, Patricia Urquiola, HitoSteyerl: "high" representatives of the only vocation they should have a city like Turin, to experience without stopping.

Two publishers brought popular scientific books to the market earlier this year, so that the interested layman could simply help to deepen and broaden his knowledge of the current scientific state of affairs. One answers over 100 urgent questions, the other allows nearly 200 scientists to write and explain their most important scientific news item. The questions and the news stories both stem from 2015, but that does not matter. The vast majority has lost nothing to actuality.

Almost daily, newspaper readers get a number of new scientific findings. A remarkable nutritional advice, for example, or a promising medicine, or an ominous event that would point to climate change. For the average newspaper reader, it is impossible to judge whether this is really important, or that the proverbial storm is in a glass of water.

"Scientific pearls" (Know This) wants to offer handles. The composer of the bundle is the American science journalist John Brockman. He is also the administrator of the Edge website, a discussion center for writers, scientists and philosophers. To the most influential scientists and thinkers he has asked the question about what they think is the most interesting and important recent scientific news.

Forecasting is not witchcraft, but learning and developing skills. To complement the original claim that [Philip] Tetlock's instructed "super-forecasters" were better than ordinary experts: some predictors were up to 30 percent more accurate than CIA analysts with access to classified information. Never underestimate the ability of the trained mind to clearly see the world.

Every year, since 1998, writer and founder of the site edge.org John Brockman asks dozens of top scientists and different personalities one question. The one in 2014 was like this: Which idea deserves to disappear? ... [W]e might add to the idea that we should try for a self-sufficient way of life.

Even today, this idea enjoys great popularity among many people, for various reasons. Some believe that self-sufficiency will help them to more freedom and independence from many external influences. Self-sufficiency allows them to cut off from the system and gain, for example, energy or food independence. For others, the idea of ​​self-sufficiency is linked to the belief that interdependence outside of their nation or group is something that is untenable in the long run. And another reason is the belief that increasing our self-sufficiency will help solve many environmental problems.

Few ideas have been scrutinized by people as self-sufficiency. The results of these efforts clearly show that it is a bad and misguided idea that has far more negatives than positive.

He has brought together scientists and artists from around the world to bring readers' insights, thoughts, and predictions about artificial intelligence: In a book about brainstorming and learning computers, John Brockman summarizes the state of the discussion.

It is one of the topics about which science and now also society have been discussing, researching, and arguing for decades: Artificial Intelligence. But it begins with the concept. Is not it better to call "designed intelligence"? Because unlike intelligence in humans, an "intelligent" program of a computer has been deliberately designed and created in a certain form. This is one of the suggestions that finds itself in a book that is as stimulating as it is entertaining by John Brockman, which is now available in German: "What do we think of artificial intelligence?"

I graduated from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Science and Technology three years ago. I have been a secondary school teacher and have been writing philosophical articles on the Internet. Recently, I was asked to write on the topic of The Third Culture, borrowed from John Brockman's "third culture".

To the annual question of The World Question Center some time ago to the community of intellectuals of Edge.org (online version of Reality Club): "What scientific concept would improve the cognitive toolbox of all?" Writer and thinker Evgeny Morozov answered that "a constant awareness of the Einstellung Effect would be a useful addition."

Morozov recalled that the Einstellung Effect refers to the mental state that predisposes us to solve a new problem by relying on methods that have been effective in the past instead of seeking an optimal solution for that particular problem, sometimes punishing our performance or affecting the result. It is true that we almost always end up solving the problem, but in the process we may have missed the opportunity to do it in a more effective, faster, more efficient way.

This is the urgent context for Know This. Even as it distills humankind’s capacity for knowledge and unveils learnings of the workings of the universe — from billion-year megatrends to infinitesimal quantum mechanics — it juxtaposes this astonishing progress with humankind’s wilful ignorance about how our actions blight the planet.

[Know This] encapsulates a convincing case for mandatory science literacy and it should be prescribed reading for government cabinets, company boards, and teachers — anyone shaping policies, people’s attitudes, or prioritising and allocating funds for research and development.

As we understand more, it becomes ever clearer that we live in an incredible world. Much of this is made possible by science, and Know This proves there are still more miracles to come.

Century after century the number of innovations that modify the human life grows; Companies must learn to deal with extreme uncertainty and have managers of "fast pivoting."

This Will Change Everything, a compilation of more than 125 essays published by Edge editor John Brockman in 2012 (and has an incredible current), thinkers Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Brian Eno and Steven Pinker speculate about a single event with the potential to completely change the history of humanity in the short or medium term.

This week's roundup of books highlights a diverse and exciting array of nonfiction titles.

Know This: Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments

With so much news on scientific developments inundating us today, how do we tell which are truly revolutionary? And what makes them so important? To help condense the most significant of the new theories and discoveries, John Brockman asked 198 of the world's finest minds which recent scientific ideas they found most significant. From technology to medical research to neuroscience to genetics, this book addresses a wide range of scientific developments, from the likes of Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Carlo Rovelli, and Peter Gabriel.

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